News analysis In a world where rich countries look for cheap labour in poor ones, bioethicists, lawyers and women's health advocates are raising questions about the outsourcing of baby-making - especially to countries like India.

Australian sociologist Associate Professor Catherine Waldby of the University of Sydney told a recent conference in Brisbane that India was undercutting the US as a preferred source of surrogate mothers for couples from developed countries.

Huge demand

"The demand for surrogacy is huge and a lot of it is unmet because most countries do not permit commercial surrogacy and in the few that do, the prices are prohibitive," she says.

Waldby says the Indian government has created special medical visas to facilitate medical tourism, including for those seeking commercial surrogacy.

She says, unlike a surrogate who uses her own eggs, a gestational surrogate makes no genetic contribution to the child.

This means the child bears no visible trace of the surrogate mother's appearance and this makes it easier for India to service a global market of people wanting to "reproduce white ethnicity", she says.

Waldby says this marketing angle is reflected in online advertisements from surrogacy clinics, which highlight only blonde western parents and babies.

Larger questions

Waldby says while there are obvious financial benefits to surrogates from fertility outsourcing, there are larger questions that should be considered.

India is already well known as a place where you can buy organs like kidneys from poor people looking to make a dollar, says Waldby.

She says commercial surrogacy could be seen as a "less onerous" way to make money.

"[But] it reinforces certain kinds of power relations between different populations," says Waldby.

"For a large proportion of the population in the world, the only capital they have is their bodies."

Lack of debate

According to New Delhi-based women's health advocacy group Sama, one surrogacy can give women enough to buy a house, but the practice needs to be regulated.

"It is being promoted as an alternative livelihood but it's not as simple as that," says Preetie Nayak of Sama.

She says women are exposed to health risks from having an embryo implanted and they can be pressured into commercial surrogacy by family.

At the same time, says Nayak, women can suffer the stigma of earning money in this way.

Nayak says surrogates will often give birth to the baby away from home so they can tell others that the baby died during birth, rather than admit they have been paid as a surrogate.

She says legal problems can also arise, for example, when the intending parents break up and one of them no longer wants the child.

"There needs to be much more public debate on the issue," says Nayak, adding the commercial surrogacy industry in India was worth US$445 million two or three years ago.

Australian laws

Australian legal academic Associate Professor Anita Stuhmcke, of the University of Technology, Sydney says most states in Australia allow women to be reimbursed for "reasonable expenses" for acting as a surrogate, which in one case has been argued to be $50,000.

But she says commercial surrogacy was criminalised in the 1980s and recent government inquiries into surrogacy laws have failed to review this decision.

"They've excluded the issue of medical tourism, excluded talking about the fact that Australians are going overseas," says Stuhmcke.

"If we ban it here of course people are going to go and find it somewhere else."

Stuhmcke says it is "irresponsible" to "push our own citizens offshore to engage in a practice elsewhere with people that may or may not get what they're due in terms of payment."

"It's a double standard to me," she says.

Stuhmcke says failure to confront the realities of commercial surrogacy mean those who engage in the practice can't discuss the issue.

"The minute they open their mouths they're classed as criminals," she says.